Latest Microsoft Blogs

For the most part, I'm an ASP.NET developer. I don't need to specify MVC or Web Forms, because it's all One ASP.NET its core. My apps are often hybrids and include not just Web Forms or MVC but also SignalR and Web API. Web Forms often gets picked on because of large View State, weird markup or maybe folks don't like the controls model. However, Web Forms has its place and it's getting even better with .NET 4.5. Here's a little sneak peek of some cool ideas Damian Edwards and the team have been working on for the next version of ASP.NET . As a place to start, remember that ASP.NET routing started in MVC and moved into core ASP.NET. Routing is useful in all ASP.NET applications - MVC, Web Pages and Web Forms. Model Binding...

Back in September, we did something with Orchard that is kind of a big deal: we transferred control over the Orchard project to the community. Most Open Source projects that were initiated by corporations such as Microsoft are nowadays still governed by that corporation. They may have an open license, they may take patches and contributions, they may have given the copyright to some non-profit foundation, but for all practical purposes, it’s still that corporation that controls the project and makes the big decisions. That wasn’t what we wanted for Orchard. We wanted to trust the community completely to do what’s best for the project. This is why we organized elections for our new Steering Committee and had five members elected. Anyone who had...

I’ll be presenting at the upcoming Belgium and Dutch TechDays next month.  I’ll be doing three tech talks at each of the events: Overview of Windows Azure A look at ASP.NET MVC 4 ScottGu Unplugged I’m particularly excited about the “A look at ASP.NET MVC 4” talk as it will be the first time I’ve presented on it (and it is shaping up to a really great release – more blog posts on that soon). For more details on how to attend the event visit the Belgium Techdays and Dutch Techdays websites.  Hope to see some of you at the conferences! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu Read More...

This coming Monday (Jan 16th) I’m doing another online LIDNUG session .  The talk will be from 10am to 11:30am (Pacific Time).  I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun.  Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting.  We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics.  Any topic is fair game: technical, strategy, community, college basketball, etc. You can learn more and register to attend the online event for free here . I’ll update this post with a download link to a recorded audio version of the talk after the event is over. Hope to get a chance to chat with some of you there! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging...

A few minutes ago Microsoft released an advance notification security bulletin announcing that we are releasing an out-of-band security update to address an ASP.NET Security Vulnerability . The security update we are releasing resolves a publicly disclosed Denial of Service issue present in all versions of ASP.NET.  We’re currently unaware of any attacks on ASP.NET customers using this exploit, but we strongly encourage customers to deploy the update as soon as possible.  We are releasing the security update via Windows Update and the Windows Server Update Service.  You can also manually download and install it via the Microsoft Download Center.  We will release the update on Thursday, December 29th at approximately 10am...

As some of you might know, I’ve spent much of my time the last 6 months working on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform (I also continue to work on ASP.NET, .NET, VS and a bunch of other products). Next Tuesday, Dec 13th we’ll be holding a special Learn Windows Azure training event for developers.  It will provide a great way to learn Windows Azure and what it provides.  You can attend the event either by watching it streamed LIVE online, or by attending in person (on the Microsoft Redmond Campus).  Both options are completely free. Learn Window Azure Event During the Learn Windows Azure event attendees will learn how to start building great cloud based applications using Windows Azure. I’ll be kicking...

Damn, Rob saw right through the PR lies of Phil Haack about the new NuGet gallery and figured it all out. Kidding, kidding. For your enjoyment and context, here is Rob’s post: http://wekeroad.com/2011/12/06/nuget-and-orchard/ Phil made a thoughtful answer to the post where he gives the rationale behind the decision: http://wekeroad.com/2011/12/06/nuget-and-orchard/#comment-380571113 What I want to address here is what that means (or not) about Orchard. “Why wasn’t it fast before?” Because by default, back when the NuGet gallery was first built, Orchard was grossly under optimized. We made a lot of progress, but it still is under optimized out of the box --in a number of ways-- which is why we’re having this discussion for the 1.4 release: http...

I’m not very satisfied with traditional database backup solutions. It seems like almost no progress was made since SQL Server 6.5 (at least for the built-in tools). They are still outputting monolithic binary backup files that only do the job if the only thing you expect from backups is the ability to recover from catastrophic failures. I expect more, but before I explain, we need a disclaimer: I am no expert of database backup and may very well miss some crucial points or some aspects of the current state of the art. The solution exposed in this post is the result of my own experiments and has no pretense at exhaustiveness or even reliability. It’s something I use on my own simple projects, and no more. Database backups are serious business...

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next release of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities.  With ASP.NET 4.5 you'll see a bunch of really nice runtime and tooling improvements with both Web Forms and MVC - as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post covers some of the improvements we are adding to the next release of Visual Studio to make working with CSS and CSS3 even better with ASP.NET projects.  CSS Color Picker In previous versions of Visual Studio, the intellisense engine within the CSS editor provided a hard-coded dropdown list of named color values. The new release of Visual Studio replaces this with...

A few weeks ago we introduced a beta of a freshly designed http://asp.net website. Today we launched it. Jon , myself, and the team that manages the site took lots of your feedback (lots from the comments of the Beta Blog Post ) and did our best to incorporate as much as we could. This is just the start, and we've got lots of plans for the future including responsive design, more text content, localization, more HTML 5, HD Video, closed captioning and lots more. It is a big site with a thousands and thousands of pages. However, a lot of those pages were hard to find. We're continuing to try to folks what they need in fewer clicks. There's new content for people getting started , including " choosing a technology " videos...